Intake and Orchestration in procurement: How do the solution providers define its role? – ORO Labs

Spend Matters is focusing on Intake and Orchestration as its main theme of deep research this quarter because we believe it is the fastest-growing procurement tech market segment today. If you’d like to understand more about what intake management and orchestration mean for procurement, read our Guide to Intake and Orchestration here.

As part of our research we are conducting analyst-led analysis/thought leadership, solution provider deep-dive analyses, webinars, and interviews with both the practitioners who use this technology and the vendors that sell it.

This niche vendor viewpoint provides thoughts on the need for this market segment and how the solution fulfils it and comes from Timothy Harfield at ORO Labs.

What was the gap in the market and the business need that ORO Labs intended to fulfil?

“ORO Labs was created in response to an important realization: that most of the greatest challenges experienced in procurement today – long cycle times and low rates of adoption by business users – are symptoms of a single root cause: poor user experience.

“ORO is a GenAI procurement platform that orchestrates teams, systems and processes so employees get exactly what they need without frustration.

“Using AI to orchestrate processes across multiple systems and teams, ORO was set up to solve the user experience problem by providing a unified and intuitive experience for employees. It frees procurement professionals from having to manually coordinate tasks, and delivers complete visibility so everyone knows how long a process will take and the current status of a particular request. With full visibility also comes the ability to identify and quickly address bottlenecks on a no-code platform built for procurement.”

Why does procurement (and business) need this extra layer of tech?

“In general, procurement orchestration (which includes intake as just one of many procurement processes that it can address) delivers value in four main areas:

• Increased compliance — By delivering effortless experiences, procurement orchestration can (1) virtually eliminate the need for training and documentation, (2) ensure that business users only need to provide information that we can reasonably expect them to know, and that we don’t already have in other systems, and (3) provide self-service access to request statuses so users have confidence that their requests are being handled in the most efficient way possible. The result is a significant reduction in maverick spend.
• Decreased cycle times — By automating the coordination of tasks and activities, orchestration frees procurement professionals to focus less on project management and more on their actual job. And because much previously manual coordination is now automated, individual tasks can be completed more quickly and frequently in parallel with other tasks.
• Improved visibility — With orchestration, procurement can see a process as it is happening and intervene where necessary. The ability to bring together data from various sources helps to mitigate risk through things like consolidated scoring and automated fraud detection. End users always know where they are in a process and how a given request is progressing. And because Procurement now has complete visibility into every stage and step, they are able to perform process mining for continuous improvement in ways that would previously have been all but impossible.
• Increased agility — Given how quickly procurement needs to respond to changing policies and business strategies, the process we build today may not be the right process tomorrow. And given how tight procurement budgets are, it can be difficult to make a case for bringing in a developer every time a simple change needs to be made. Orchestration via a no-code platform empowers procurement professionals to make changes quickly, inexpensively, and without introducing unnecessary risk.”

Analyse the vendor

Read our full analysis of ORO Lab’s solution in this Vendor Analysis, part of our members’ subscription service.

Get help

You can engage Spend Matters to help you find your best-fit solution (including a current assessment of your organization, RFx and selection advisory).

Learn more

To know more about the technology, watch a recording of our webinar, “Demystifying Intake and Orchestration in Procurement.” Our analysts define what Intake and Orchestration technologies are, showcase use cases and explain how investing in these technologies could benefit your business.